Ruben Gallego showed colleagues on the House floor how to use pens as weapons to defend themselves against January 6 rioters and then took home the pen he used to sign his oath of office on the Senate floor, a total of 1,458 days. The time it takes from riding on patrol in Iraq to his wife instructing him to stand still while she puts his new Senate pin on his lapel is 20 years, but it feels even shorter.
And it’s been less than three months since he and Donald Trump, two men with vastly different life stories and paths into politics, both won in Arizona, a state undergoing significant demographic and political change.
“To be honest, my life has been really intriguing. “So nothing really shocks or surprises me anymore when things happen,” Gallego told AWN as he walked back from his ceremonial swearing-in in the old Senate chamber on Friday. “I’m just very lucky to experience a lot of good stuff, at least.”
Gallego, like any other Senate member, is driven by a strong desire to succeed. The rest makes Gallego, 45, an unlikely fit for an institution that has been dominated and primarily occupied by older White males with a lot of money from the 1790s to the present.
Gallego joked about not being in his old chamber for the House speaker vote and reflected on what he’d been through, pulling along an 8-year-old son who was already tired and sick before sullenly telling Kamala Harris during the swearing-in photo-op that he was sorry she hadn’t won – the vice president hugged him and said, “Nope, we’re not defeated” – and carrying his sometimes squirming 18-month-old daughter on his shoulders.
“I’m not far removed from working for minimum wage. I’m not that far off from sleeping on the floor [of his childhood home, as one of four children raised by a single mother]. “I’m not too far removed from going on patrol,” Gallego added. “Because it happened so recently, I’ll be able to share that true experience with them. And the ability to grasp how difficult it is to pay rent, to access the VA, to try to achieve your family’s goals, and how important it is to have a government that is responsive to those challenges.”
As he spoke, an elevator door in the Capitol opened, revealing Dave McCormick, the Republican who spent millions of dollars from his banking profession to unseat longtime Pennsylvania political fixture Sen. Bob Casey. They shared a moment of recognition, a “Congratulations!” from one group of family members to another, and a touch on each other’s upper arms that neither felt entirely at ease with.
Time in a sandwich shop and Marines
Since his narrower-than-expected victory over Kari Lake in November, the Democrat has made the rounds in the media, pitching ideas for how his party may begin to win back more Latinos like him. He describes how he and Trump both won his state, despite his liberalism as a poor first-generation Chicagoan and the president-elect’s ostentatiously affluent nativist nostalgia. He stated that voters were clearly yearning for outsiders last year.
His swearing-in ceremony in the basement of the Capitol Visitor Center drew a diverse crowd, including his high school librarian and his first supervisor at the sandwich shop where he worked to help pay the rent. As they mingled over drinks and sandwiches, both Marines he patrolled Iraq with 20 years ago and members of the mariachi band brought in for the occasion took selfies with him.
“Because of him, I believe in our country. I often feel down. Because of him, I have hope, “said Steve Zerlentes, who remembers teaching Gallego how to make Chicago-style hot dogs and cheese fries, and also remembers asking his new 16-year-old employee what he wanted to do for a job and laughing when the answer came back:” I want to be the president.
He chuckled, recalling Gallego’s reaction: “What’s so funny?”
“I said, ‘Good luck, go for it,'” Zerlentes explained. “What am I going to say?”
Gallego laughed when he heard Zerlentes’ account.
“I did?!” he exclaimed. “I was crazy.”
Zerlentes was not alone. Linda Connor, Gallego’s high school librarian, recalls telling him after he graduated that he was going to be president, and that all he had to do in return for assisting him and hosting him for Trivial Pursuit nights at her house was to place her in charge of the Library of Congress.
John Bailon recalls the first time he met Gallego, when they learned that a new recruit had recently joined the Delta Company 4th Reconnaissance Battalion after graduating from Harvard. He remembered their reaction when they found out the guy with the fancy degree wouldn’t be coming in as an officer: “Let’s go meet this idiot!”
They connected over their shared support for John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election, despite the fact that many of their fellow Marines supported George W. Bush instead. They discussed politics, specifically whether troops like them should have been in Iraq. They never discussed Gallego running for government, but those days in training and deployment together instilled so much else — how they all cleared their throats and walked, how they would hold up in war when the time came.
Gallego was not GI Joe. He was intelligent, which may be irritating for those with whom he disagreed, but Bailon and others recall keeping up with him. They remember him tying a rope around the leg of a Marine who wouldn’t stop snoring and yanking him to his side every time the noise started. They remember the day his best friend was killed by an IED after Gallego’s car went over it without detonating it.
Bailon remains a proud Democrat. He recorded an ad supporting Gallego during the Senate campaign. He expresses frustration that the victory came in the same election that returned Trump to the White House, but he feels that “time will show” that the president-elect is not the appropriate choice in the same way that his friend is. Gallego frequently discusses how, now that he has won the Senate campaign, he embodies the American ideal, and Bailon agrees: “Americans want to see someone who came from their neighborhood.”
Gallego thinks that his politics are pragmatic rather than progressive or ideological. But now that he’s settling into his new job in a new Washington, he thinks his and Trump’s triumphs send a message that extends beyond the Arizonans who supported for both of them.
“Democrats need to figure out how to always be fighting for the little guy, because if not, someone else is going to take that mantle,” according to him.
Andrew Taylor, who met Gallego when the Marines from Albuquerque were combined with a group from Ohio before being sent to Iraq, said that’s especially important to people his age, those on the cusp of the end of Generation X and the oldest millennials, who were shaped by the September 11, 2001, attacks and the great financial crash a few years later, the first to see crumble the promises of what going to college and playing by the old rules was supposed to mean.
Taylor suggested that Gallego’s progress could serve as a sign that everything is not lost.
Despite the political back and forth, “there are still a lot of people who feel like we can do that,” Taylor added.
Adjusting to his new life in the Senate
Gallego’s mix is already beginning to play out. One of the Capitol police officers who was there on January 6, 2021, was invited to the thank you meals with supporters on Friday night, following his swearing in. Utah Sen. Mike Lee, a conservative ally of the president-elect who, in the days following the 2020 election, initially urged the previous Trump White House to look for legal avenues to pursue claims of fraud around the results but eventually soured on the effort, learned that the mariachi band would be at his midday reception and invited them to stop by. They are unlikely to cosponsor much legislation together, but they have agreed to at least practice their Spanish together.
Mark Kelly, a former astronaut and well-known gun safety advocate who joined the chamber four years ago amid a tight presidential election in Arizona, said he’s glad to have a new partner, with Gallego replacing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who grew up poor and was known over her one term for being a constantly unpredictable force who eventually quit the Democratic Party.
Gallego will be unlike many others in the Senate, but Kelly believes it all comes down to being able to “nudge the thing in a certain direction.” But there’s a lot of inertia and resistance.
When asked if he believes the new senator or the new president-elect better reflects the future of the state they both won, Kelly indicated he is siding with his own partner in Washington.
“I really believe in our country,” Kelly stated. “So, I believe the future of this country is more in accordance with what Ruben represents.